Today is a pretty big deal. Why you ask? Because we just rolled out 3 major updates to the InvestorCarrot platform (Carrot V2) that are going to make your life easier, more effective, and be an amazing platform to house our future inbound marketing tools and features.

It’s funny how things work out. For the past 6 months we’ve been working on some big projects here at Carrot and several of them just happened to wrap up around the same time. So we decided to do one big release (after a bunch of testing) this morning of those 3 major updates.

More under the radar, we’ve also released dozens of other smaller updates this year and have other big updates rolling out over the next several weeks (like Land Buying / Selling websites, and more).

But let’s dive in to what’s new in your InvestorCarrot account as of today!

NEW: The Carrot Dashboard: The Foundation For The Future

Our vision here at Carrot is to build the single most effective and simple to use tool for high achieving real estate investors (and soon to be agents as well) to attract more high quality prospects online and convert more of them into profitable leads. With tens of thousands of leads per month being pulled in through our platform by our members every month already, we’re proud as heck of what our members like you have helped us build over the past 2.5 years.

But, to make room for the amazing features and tools we have planned for the rest of 2016 and into 2017, we decided to redesign your user dashboard from the ground up.

More simplified dashboard showing your websites in a more compact space

We’ve brought many of the settings for your websites out of the confusing WordPress interface and into a simple and intuitive custom dashboard. Want to add tracking codes to your site? Attach a domain? Great, it’s just 2 clicks away now :-)

More robust website stats! (more on that below)

Better organized way to display the different types of websites you can setup in your account

Check Out More Of Our Latest Features:

NEW: Know Your Numbers With Carrot Site Stats

Having quick access to your basic website stats is important to knowing what’s working and what isn’t. So we decided to bring more useful data and fancy graphs right into your dashboard for each website.

This will help you save time from having to learn Google Analytics and it’ll deliver you the essential traffic data that you need on a continual basis. You’ll notice more changes to your stats to come as well so be on the lookout!

Now See Robust Traffic Stats (more to come!)

At Carrot, all of our website design decisions are based on performance. Will these changes improve the conversion rate and overall ROI for our clients or not?

Over the past year we’ve had countless requests for “new site designs” so you can even better stand out from other’s in your market. After all, you already know that Carrot is the most effective tool for SEO and conversion in the industry (which is why more Carrot websites control more top 5 Google rankings for search phrases that matter than any other REI platform)… but you still want more options to look a bit different.

But because we’re committed to high performance we decided we weren’t going to just roll out some pretty designs and call it a day.

So we embarked on what became a 10 month journey of split testing over 20 designs on over 100 websites to tens of thousands of visitors to find some other “styles” that perform at least as well as our current high performing style you’ve come to recognize and love.

A Screenshot Of Just One Of Our Tests…

A screenshot of a “winning” test we ran last fall on a site as a part of our massive effort to roll out fresh designs that perform up to our standards.

And after all of that testing, we found 4 fresh styles that perform up to our standards and give you that design flexibility to look different.

Then we started from scratch and completely rebuilt our entire code base around our websites from the ground up so every part of our websites perform even better on mobile, look more clean, are easier to use, and use our new “Site Customizer” to make editing your appearance settings a breeze.

IMPORTANT NOTE:I know I know, you’ve had a website up with us for a while and you’re chomping at the bit to move over to one of these fresh styles. I would be too. But for now, these fresh styles are available only for new websites launched from today moving forward. We are working on a migration tool to move existing websites over to these fresh site styles for those who want to, but we didn’t want to make you all wait another couple of months to leverage these designs for your NEW sites.

Also, our original site style in use on all existing websites before today is still our highest performing design in aggregate and one we’re not abandoning anytime soon. It’s still a beast. These fresh styles just give some more design options without sacrificing performance because they’re all tested, proven, and built with our Carrot Conversion methodology at the core.

With that said, take a quick peak at our new site styles below. We’ve just used motivated house seller websites for these examples… but these styles can be used on any of our website types on websites launched from today on.

Each style is named after some of our favorite Oregon trees. We love the outdoors and LOVE our home state of Oregon and want to spread some Oregon love.

The Madrone – Clean, Re-Imagined Header, Striking Image

With the Madrone style you’ll really be able to leverage a local image and our eye catching “action bar” at the top of your website. This looks even more amazing on mobile.

The Douglas – Our Original Mainstay Design Modernized For The Future

The Douglas Fir is the most popular tree in our county and the mainstay of our local timber industry. So what better name for the most popular and productive site style in use by Carrot members today. We refreshed the design a bit, added new features such as social media icons as an option in the header, our new site customizer, and more.

The Cedar – Simple And Striking

The Cedar leverages our same proven conversion elements we’ve honed over the years and wraps them around a new visual. You’ll notice the full height hero image, no black box around the call to action text, and transparent header. This style looks amazing on mobile and retains the high performance we demand.

The Juniper – Draws Your Eye Straight To The CTA

If you know anything about Juniper trees is that they suck all of the water out of the ground they are growing in. When we tested this design (we originally called it the “Stacked Hero” internally) we ran the test on 20+ websites all across the country at once… and it consistently sucked more leads out of the web than most everything else we tested. Some markets it converted considerably higher, most it was right on par with our original style, and a couple it was slightly lower. But in aggregate it was our highest performing of the fresh site styles.

How To Use A New Site Style On A New Website

Just login to your account, launch a new website, then click “Design” in the settings area. Then you can browse the fresh new styles, preview, and activate all in a few seconds.

And as a reminder in case you missed it above,these fresh site styles are currently available for new websites launched from today on forward. Any existing websites we recommend you stay with the original (as it is still our highest performer as far as lead volume goes) until we complete our “Site Migrator” to help those who want a different visual look for their existing sites over to one of the new styles above.

NEW: Simplified Way To Adjust Settings And Branding

One of the biggest pains in the butt when you’re editing the design settings of most websites including Carrot is you couldn’t immediately see how those changes would impact the look of your website without saving them… and going to your actual URL and refreshing your website. Pain right?

Well we’ve solved that with our new robust Website Customizer.

We’ve consolidated many of the most important settings in the Customizer and also added some amazing new features to get you from “idea” to “launch” more quickly with less headache.

Some of the biggest changes in the customizer are…

Preview your design changes in real time right in your account

Build a professional and clean logo in the app if you don’t already have one

More easily and quickly brand your site (no coding required)

Adjust your navigation menus and sidebar content right there too!

… and other new features (go explore and find ’em :-)

Now Preview Your Design Changes In Real-Time!

Quick And Simple Logo Builder + Brand Center

Innovating For Your Future

Behind the scenes we’re working our butts off to keep you at the cutting edge as far as inbound marketing goes for your real estate investing business.

Mobile

We continue to focus a ton of energy and resources on innovations on mobile design and performance. Be on the lookout for even more improvements in the coming months to keep you ahead of the mobile curve.

Performance

Performance and ROI are at the heart of why so many people are switching to Carrot and getting better results from Carrot than any other platform they’ve tried (even their custom websites). We’re currently testing tools that we plan on launching as “apps” within your Carrot account to help you squeeze out more gains on your websites… including our “Campaign Tracker” and more robust lead manager that are next on our development timeline.

SEO

The Carrot community holds more top rankings than any other website platform for investors, but we want to build out a full “front to back” inbound online marketing tool to help you identify good keywords to target, track the ranking of those keywords, tracking your competitors, and more.

Support

Often times the “unsexy” part of why our customers succeed is our support structure. Our team here at Carrot, Mastermind calls, and trainings. So we’re investing even more into that team this summer and into new services and trainings that we’ll make available only to Carrot members.

In the end, if you LOVE Carrot now, you’re going to really love it each and every month as our product vision unfolds.

Hit me with your thoughts on some of these features below in the comments section and go out there and crush it with these new features!

About the Author – Trevor Mauch

Trevor is the CEO of InvestorCarrot and knows a thing or two about inbound marketing and generating leads online in the real estate industry. As an investor himself, he's generated tens of thousands of real estate leads and is a leading expert in inbound marketing for investors and agents. In addition, his true passion is helping entrepreneurs grow businesses that truly help you live a life of purpose.

An amazing update!!! Great to see how easy things are and how many items this is going to replace. The focus on performance is another sign that you and your team understand and are committed to conversions. Look forward to all that the future holds

Hey Edgar! As far as “ppc friendly”… the main things to look at there are does the site have the elements Google likes to see on landing pages / sites like easy contact info, privacy policy on bottom of every page, etc. etc. YES, all Carrot sites have all of those elements built in and then you can personalize the content on them any way you want from there.

Next, does the site convert well with PPC traffic?

Of course the website itself is only part of the equation… the campaign, the keywords, how the PPC campaign is managed, the ads, etc. all play into whether the PPC campaign returns a solid ROI.

All Carrot sites are built based on our Carrot Conversion Methodology and we’re constantly doing testing and tweaking every month including on sites running PPC traffic.

Carrot sites perform at a higher level than any other real estate investor website platform and our team is there to help you if you run into any issues w/ your marketing as you go.

So YES, we’re here for you man!!! Also our sites make it easy to get all of your tracking codes in place, retargeting, etc.